Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/271

 He looked at her for a long time in despairing silence. "My God, Ma! Can't you see? Can't you understand? From now on, I'm going to stand on my own. I'm going to work things out. I've got to get out of this mess. . . . I've got to."

He rose abruptly, and put on his hat.

"Philip?" she asked, drying her eyes, "where are you going now?"

"I'm going to buy blankets for myself."

"Philip, listen to me. For God's sake, listen! Don't ruin everything. I've a right to something. I'm your mother. Doesn't that mean anything?"

He turned for a moment hesitating, and then quickly said, "Ma, don't talk like that, it isn't fair."

Without another word, he put on his hat and hurried out of the restaurant.

Once outside, the cold air cleared his head, and he was thankful that he had been hard as a stone. Again he was sorry for Emma in a vague, inexplicable fashion; she could never understand what it was that made him hard. She couldn't see why he had to behave thus.

"I wish to God," he thought bitterly, "that I'd had a mother who wasn't a fine woman. Life would have been so much easier. And I can't hurt her . . . I can't. I love her."

And suddenly he saw that in all their talk together nothing had really been settled. Nothing had been changed or decided. 

He went that night to sleep in the room above the stable, and on the following Tuesday Naomi and the